I
was relaxing as is my custom with a Beer Lao reflecting on just getting a proposal
in to the United States Embassy, when my calmness was abruptly interrupted with
a “ting- ting”.

It
was Darrin or Sharon Henry with another one of their fascinating tweets, one more flashback to their wanderings earlier this year, and this one by chance
was from Cambodia. It was a cute capture of a boy spooning some dessert in to
his girl-friend’s eager mouth. Now 11.30 am Phnom Penh is 4.30am Saint Helena. Is
there a time delay or are they up at some unearthly hour, nocturnal tweeting?

Tender Moment?

Their
welcome tweet made me reflect. What a
shame we hadn’t applied for a grant from the same fund for Saint Helena, to
help preserve its indigenous culture, before it is assaulted after the new
airport opens.

Now
some of us have already made that point. We believe that if the “Tourism”
experiment is to succeed (Plan A), then it needs to be more ambitious to work
(Plan B), and there also needs to be a Plan C, if it doesn’t.

Saint Helena's new precipitous airport

Since
writing my piece on that, I have subsequently learned that Cape Town is not to
be the base for flights between South Africa and Saint Helena. That seems to be an astonishing decision,
given the close ties over hundreds of years.
But then commonsense is seldom a factor in overseas aid and development
decision-making.

As
I sat there pondering, folks kept passing by. Many of them were
backpackers. Now unless it has escaped
me, I do not recall reading about backpackers in Saint Helena’s tourism plan?

Backpackers
can get a bad rap. Unless they are a
recycled teenagers like Darrin and Sharon, they are invariably young lads and lasses fresh out-of-school or university making
their own way out in to the big wide world, for adventure, before settling down in
to conventional work and family-life. So
they do tend to “let their hair down”.
However that is not the full story.

Backpackers
are often the first tourists to discover places. They are happy with whatever they find. They
do not demand 5-star service and facilities, the creature comforts of home-from-home. They eat as the locals. Most backpackers budget daily to make their
money last. They may not spend a lot but
almost every one of their dollars stays in the local economy, unlike those spent in the big hotel
chains.

So
there should be a place for them literally on Saint Helena.

For
the air-service to be viable, only one thing counts: “bums-on-seats”. Flights
must be full. So it would make sense to attract tourists of all categories, not
just the elite. And Donny would welcome a bigger crowd.

Backpackers settle for modest accommodation, even
dormitories. Many can be housed in a fraction of the space, and cost, needed
for elite visitors. (See note below.)

So please welcome all wanderers!

If you log in to hear the song, it will ring in your ears all day! Purge with the Wanderer!

A fine view of my native Northumberland on the road
from Alnwick to Rothbury over to the Cheviot Hills. Mind you my wanderings tend to go only as far
as the Queen’s Head.

Communal
kitchen/dining space with utensils for basic cooking of snacks

“Hanging
out” area to lounge, read, surf internet, recover from last night’s late
frolics.

* A "Wannabe"? from the Spice Girls song of that name: "I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want, So tell me what you want, what you really really want, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want to want...."

2 comments:

Hi John, enjoyed your post. Tried 3 times to leave a comment but each time I think I’ve done it I end up back at the start!Was trying to let you know we do work unearthly hours as the internet between midnight and 6am is free, so there is a growing culture across the island for people to stay up or get up just to go online. Our internet package costs £101.36 for just 6.5GB of data which as you can imagine we can burn through easily. Going over the allowance is charged at 9p/MB. The month after we returned from our travels we lapsed with monitoring our usage and went over to the cost of more than £80.

Say hi to Phnom Penh for us, we had an amazing time there and would love to return sometime.

Happy new year,Darrin & Sharon

BTW, it’s 1.33am now. Even though the window is free it is excruciatingly slow as a lot of people are using it, so what in the UK would take us 20 mins to do, ie a blog post, can easily take 2 and half hours here!

My reply:Now that cost will of course put off many travellers but be under no doubt, it will come down. I was paying US$50 per month until about 4 years ago, and that was a reduction from the kind of rate you are paying now.

Today I pay about $2 a month and rarely are there any glitches in this....developing country! In fact internet is poorer, slower in parts of Northumberland in the UK. We also have free wi-fi just about everywhere too. It will come, to Saint Helena unless of course SHG does not allow competition and internet freedom!

15 September 2016 - the Northumbrian vista above I took as me elderly Aunt "Wor Iza" wanted to show me where she wanted her ashes to go. Sadly that is a wish we must now honour and carry out. And by the way, USAID did not approve our proposal. I have to say it seems odd to me that those countries who have histories of decimating their "first peoples" seem reluctant to help us avoid the same fate in Cambodia.